Tara Habibzadeh
Critical Seeing: of Neo-Orientalism in Contemporary Art
Block seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Monday/Tuesday, 20.7./21.7. and Thursday/Friday, 23.7./24.7.2026, each 10-17 h, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 004

Registration on Moodle starts on 9.4.2026:  https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=3033
Enrolment Key: seeing

While “western” powers with colonial background existentially depend on forceful hybridisation combined with performative and violent mixing of identities to artificially diversify and moralize their politics, art and culture, the "east" is naturally divers, multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural, hence home to refinement and differentiations in the arts. Having their own powerful place in the world of arts long before Western thinkers imagined the East as exotic and “unaware of itself” or “aesthetically useful tool for politics”, we will highlight the shift from self-representation to colonized image-making, and how this history still shapes global contemporary art.

This seminar juxtaposes Neo-Orientalism in contemporary art and historical self-representation in Iran and pre-colonial Hindustan. We will use simple language to briefly introduce Edward Said’s defining theory of Orientalism, learning about the depictions of the “East” in the 19th century and ends with examples from contemporary art that either engage critically with this legacy or naively reproduce it.

Contemporary artists such as Shirin Neshat, Anish Kapoor, Shahzia Sikander, Monir Shahroudi Farmanfarmayian, Imran Qureshi and Iranian Cinema vs western/diasporic Cinema about Iran will be discussed as case studies.

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation:regular and active participation.

Tara Habibzadeh: Born and raised in Tehran with an academic background in Physics, German Law, Art and Philosophy (UdK 2026), Habibzadeh’s works think in analogies and metaphors for hypercomplex systems using the mundane trivial while challenging the neo-orientalist binaries with scientific methods. Their varied works include painting, installation, film, video game, poetry. They live and work in Tehran and Berlin.